Free refactoring tools for ASP.NET code in Visual Studio 2005

DevExpress today announced the availability of Refactor! for ASP.NET -- a free add-on to Visual Studio 2005 that enables very cool refactoring capabilities for ASP.NET code. The add-on can be downloaded from here:

Refactor! is designed to be as unobtrusive as possible, so you won't see any menus or splash screens to alert you to its presence. Instead, you need to select the code or move the caret onto the element you want to change. Then you'll see a small smart tag near the caret telling you a refactoring is

available.

Refactor! for ASP.NET works in VS 2005, but will not work in earlier versions of VS. Also, it only works on code belonging to ASP.NET projects.

Note that some refactorings are not available yet on content pages, so if you're expecting a refactoring inside a page that is referred to by a ContentPlaceholder, that may be why you're not seeing what you're expecting.

Probably the easiest test is to move the caret onto an identifier or style that can be renamed and look for a smart tag beneath that identifier. If you don't see a smart tag and/or if pressing Ctrl+` (Ctrl plus the back-tick) fails to do anything, please contact support@devexpress.com and send them a small sample to help us reproduce the issue.

Also, for Surround with Update panel to be available, the Atlas extensions must be installed on your machine.

If you're still having trouble getting smart tags or the Refactor! popup menu to appear, please send a small sample ASP.NET project that we can reproduce the problem with to support@devexpress.com.

Hopefully we'll see Expression Web sync in the next release for add-on architecture so my web designers can take advantage of the CSS refactoring. Visual Studio is too big for what they typically work with.